Sig Christenson is a veteran military reporter who has made nine trips to the war zone. He writes regularly for Hearst about service members, veterans and heroes, among other topics. He is also the co-founder and former president of Military Reporters and Editors, founded in 2002.

February 2013

02/28/2013

AUSTIN — The entire family drove from San Antonio to Austin to bid farewell to Sgt. 1st Class Mario Orta as he readied to leave Texas for Kuwait.

Flanked
by UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, Orta's wife, three children, mother
and grandmother sat on metal risers with hundreds of others in a hangar
as prayers were said and patriotic songs played.

“I get real sad,” Maria Orta said of her son. “He's a part of me.”

Tearful
goodbyes at ceremonies like these have become a ritual of war for
American troops and their families since 9/11. But the 500-plus soldiers
and families who converged on Austin-Bergstrom International Airport to salute the 449th Aviation Support Battalion were part of an event that is going to become increasingly rare.

Shrinking
defense budgets, the looming sequester and the troop drawdown in
Afghanistan will transform active-duty and reserve component forces.
What comes next isn't clear, but some in the National Guard fear a
return to an era when it had inferior equipment and few opportunities to
prove its worth to the Pentagon.

“They
value us, but money's going to get tight and what we've seen in the
past is when the active gets cut, the guard gets cut, and when there's
limited resources they'll go to the active-duty first and the guard
second,” explained the Texas Guard's adjutant general, Maj. Gen. John Nichols, a member of the Air National Guard since 1992.

“The last time we had a drawdown, relations between the Army and the Army National Guard were quite contentious,” said John Goheen, a spokesman for the National Guard Association of the United States. “When resources become constrained, the battles for resources get tough.”

A
strategic reserve during the Cold War, the guard emerged as an
operational force after 9/11. Nichols said the Pentagon is crafting
plans to send the guard to places like South Korea once every five years
or have part-time troops ready for national disasters.

In the
last decade, Texas Guard, the nation's largest at 22,710 troops, has
been an A-team player. It has sent 32,127 soldiers and airmen overseas,
and in that time, 16 soldiers have died in combat. The last killed was
Staff Sgt. Nelson David Trent, 37, of Round Rock, who died in December in a roadside bombing near Kandahar.

Today,
a San Antonio-based medical evacuation company that flew mercy missions
in Iraq in 2008 is in Afghanistan. D Company, 3-144th Infantry has 200
GIs pulling airfield security. The 136th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade's
189 soldiers handle logistics and communications for bases around Kabul.

But
fewer guardsmen are at war. The number deployed in December, 16,383
soldiers, was 40 percent under three years ago. And where 3,000 Texans
went on a single mission to Iraq in 2004, 1,298 soldiers in 14 units
will deploy between now and next year, with one intelligence unit
consisting of just six GIs.

“Deployments are going to be small, they're going to dwindle down,” said Command Sgt. Maj. Jose Cazares,
53, of San Antonio. “And compared with the amount of deployments we've
had in the past, it's getting to the point where for many of our
soldiers it may be the first and last deployments of their career.”

02/25/2013

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration's decision to lift the ban on
women in combat opens the door for a change in the law that compels only
men 18-25 to register for a military draft, according to legal experts
and military historians.

Never before has the country drafted women into military service, and
neither the administration nor Congress is in a hurry to make them
register for a future call-up.

But, legally, they may have no other choice.

Now that front-line infantry, armor, artillery and special operations
jobs are open to female volunteers who can meet the physical
requirements, it will be difficult for anyone to make a persuasive
argument that women should continue to be exempt from registration, said Diane Mazur, a law professor at the University of Floria and a former Air Force officer.

“They're going to have to show that excluding women from the draft
actually improves military readiness,” Mazur said. “I just don't see how
you can make that argument.”

Groups that backed the end of the ban on women in combat also support
including women in draft registration as a matter of basic citizenship.

Women should have the same civic obligations as men, said Greg Jacob, a former Marine Corps officer and policy director for the Service Women's Action Network. “We see registration as another step forward in terms of equality and fairness,” Jacob said.

Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., who heads the House Armed Services Committee, hasn't made up his mind. McKeon said through a spokesman that he's awaiting a Defense Department report due in the coming weeks that will assess the legal impact of lifting the ban on women in combat on draft registration.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, is doing the very same thing.

“The Department (of Defense) is currently undergoing a lengthy and
thoughtful process to provide guidance on the details of the new policy
lifting the direct ground combat exclusion rule for the 200,000-plus
women who bravely serve our nation in the military,” he said. “I look
forward to studying those results to understand if any additional policy
changes need to be made.”

A poll by Quinnipiac University
found that American voters firmly oppose a return to conscription.
Also, adding women to the mix doesn't appear to be a high priority for a
battle-weary nation nearing the end of more than a decade of war.

Days before the budget sequester takes effect, military and community
leaders around the state are girding themselves for cuts that could
cost Texas 91,000 jobs.

From Texarkana, Killeen and Del Rio to San Antonio, Corpus Christi
and El Paso, leaders spent the weekend trying to gauge how $46 billion
in defense reductions will affect their cities come Friday.

They have few clues, other than Pentagon
plans to furlough 800,000 civilians for 22 days between April 25 and
Sept. 30, putting them on a four-day workweek. At Army installations
alone, 29,958 Texas civilians will be furloughed, prompting fears of an
economic slowdown.

“I think it's madness,” Richard Dayoub,
president and CEO of El Paso's chamber of commerce, said of the
sequester, adding, “I've heard members of Congress say that to me.”

A Pew Charitable Trust
study said only Virginia and California would be bigger losers than
Texas in the sequester. It also found that 91,600 people in the state
would be out of work if it takes effect. Texas would lose $6.48 billion
in defense contractor revenue and 12,000 civil service jobs.

“The mood is very negative and very fearful about what this is
actually going to turn into long term for the country and, of course,
the local economy,” said Richard Perez, president and CEO of the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce.

Eller refused to allow prosecutors to use the evidence, saying
society views the Fourth Amendment as so crucial that the cost is that
“occasionally we punish the government and lose the prosecution.”

A basic-training supervisor, Wicks was the ninth instructor at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland
to be tried on sexual misconduct charges. He's the first to walk out of
his trial without being punished, though his case might not be over.

So far, 32 instructors at Lackland have come under investigation for
misconduct with 62 recruits and technical training students in the
largest sex scandal in Air Force history. Just one trainer convicted of
misconduct, Staff Sgt. Donald Davis, did not get jail time.

The charges against Wicks, who faced up to 16 years in prison, were
based on evidence investigators culled from his iPhone. The defense
filed a motion asking Eller to suppress evidence from the phone, arguing
that agents got it without his consent and did not get a warrant before
finding some of 45,000-plus messages.

Prosecutors countered that investigators didn't need the phone to
support at least two allegations. But Eller, in making his decision,
said the phone and evidence were “inextricably linked.”

The Air Force said Wicks sent a video of himself masturbating to one
woman and asked another to lie. He never entered a plea and didn't take
the stand.

But Wicks' ex-girlfriend did. Testifying under immunity, Tech Sgt. Ronda Roberts recalled discovering improper texts as he slept at her home in November 2010.

The next May, Roberts took his phone and lied to a superior about it.
She said Wicks indignantly admitted to the indecent act in an argument.

Roberts told Security Forces Detective Arlene Rico
about the phone and gave it to her the next week. Rico said she combed
through rosters to find two women without using texts from the phone.

The judge, though, noted that Rico referred to messages gleaned from
the phone while interviewing a woman in California and suggested that
agents could have sought a warrant after the detective met Roberts, a
view shared by one Houston law expert.

“The easy thing to do, that they could have done in this situation,
is they could have just gone with the ex-girlfriend's affidavit. A sworn
statement of what she saw on the phone would have created enough
probable cause that a magistrate would have granted a warrant,” South
Texas College of Law Professor Geoffrey Corn said.

Prosecutors have until Friday to appeal Eller's ruling. In the
meantime, it isn't clear what will happen to Wicks. He could be kicked
out of the service, but he can appeal to an administrative discharge
board.

02/19/2013

The case against an Air Force instructor accused of misconduct with
three women could hinge on evidence on a cellphone that his
ex-girlfriend stole from him and gave to investigators.

Air Force Col. Donald Eller Jr., the judge in the case, will decide today whether the cellphone evidence is admissible in the trial of Tech Sgt. Samuel Wicks.

Wicks,
on trial at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, faces up to 16 years in
prison on three charges and five specifications of misconduct.

“The first bad act of the government was taking the phone without his permission,” Wicks' lawyer, Maj. Naomi Dennis said, asking Eller to throw out the charges.

Prosecutors
said Wicks had prohibited personal relationships with women in
technical training, that he asked one of the women to lie about their
relationship, and committed an indecent act.

Unlike many
instructors charged in a scandal that has seen 32 trainers and 62 airmen
identified as victims, Wicks did not meet the women. The Air Force said
he wanted to have sex with two women and had an unprofessional
relationship with a third.

The defense has asked that evidence
linked to the cellphone should be suppressed because it was given to
investigators without his consent, and that agents didn't ask for a
search warrant before scrutinizing the device.

02/17/2013

A basic training instructor accused of sending a trainee a video of
himself masturbating goes to trial this week as the Air Force steps up
the pace of legal proceedings in a growing boot camp sex scandal.

Tech. Sgt. Samuel Wicks
faces up to 18 years for sending the video over a cellphone as well as
trying to strike up relationships with women he never met.

It is the first of four court-martials over the next five weeks at
Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, and part of an effort to uncover
wrongdoing and punish it.

“As far as I'm concerned, we will turn over every rock and are not
afraid of what we might find because we believe it is absolutely
important and critical for the integrity of the institution that we do
the absolute best job we can of understanding the extent of what
happened and ensuring that we protect any victims,” said Gen. Edward Rice Jr., head of the Air Education and Training Command.

So far, 32 basic training instructors have fallen under investigation
for misconduct with 62 recruits and technical school trainees at
Lackland. The trainers so far convicted in eight military trials either
had sex or sought to have sex with trainees. But some of them, Wicks
included, never touched even one of the fledgling airmen.

Both are forbidden by AETC, with instructors told they can spend two
years in prison for violations. The rules are well known. In 2006, top
Air Force leaders outlined the law on illicit conduct during national
Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

They stated that physical force wasn't needed to commit rape. Simply
placing a person in fear is enough. That can happen by telling a victim
that not having sex could hurt or end his or her career.

That issue arose last week as Staff Sgt. Craig LeBlanc,
27, of North Richland Hills near Fort Worth was given 21/2 years in
prison on eight charges of sexual misconduct. He was found not guilty of
sexually assaulting the woman, who was then 19 and had just graduated
from basic training, after prosecutors failed to prove he threatened
her.

The outcome angered Nancy Parrish,
founder of Protect Our Defenders, a group that helped coordinate
testimony before a recent congressional hearing on the scandal. She
noted that trainees, who've often testified they feared saying no when
pressured for sex, cannot legally consent to have liaisons with
instructors.

“If this isn't an outrageous example of a broken military justice
system, then I don't know what is,” said Parrish, calling it “a defense
protective system on steroids, filled with command and gender bias,
conflicts of interest and a culture of victim blaming.”

But retired Army lawyer Geoffrey Corn, professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston, said the military's sentencing system often works.

02/15/2013

An Air Force basic training instructor facing 22 years in prison was
given 21/2 years Thursday after he was found guilty on all but one of
nine charges that included a 2011 tryst with a recruit.

Staff Sgt. Craig LeBlanc, 27, was the eighth trainer to be tried for sexual misconduct at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in an ongoing scandal, which has become the largest ever in the Air Force.

So far, 32 instructors have been charged with having illicit contact with 62 recruits and technical training students.

Prosecutors branded him a bad apple who was so rotten, he used his
status as a trainer as a pickup line outside a San Antonio bar.

They said LeBlanc repeatedly broke the law and had turned his back on
the Air Force's core values of integrity, service before self and
excellence. Instead, he embraced dishonor, self over service and crime.

He didn't deny the portrayal.

“Before I went into confinement, I was very unhealthy. I had a lot of
issues that had not been addressed by me,” LeBlanc said, adding that
people from his parents to his fiancee warned he had things to work on.
“I didn't want to confront my issues. I wanted to run from them.”

Facing a battery of allegations that included sexually assaulting a woman, he was at risk of going to prison for 52 years.

Only one of the other trainers who've gone to trial is to spend more time behind bars. Staff Sgt. Luis Walker, convicted of raping one recruit and illicit involvement with nine others, got 20 years last summer.

Col. Donald Eller
Jr., the Air Force judge deciding the case, found LeBlanc not guilty of
sexual assault, the most serious of all the charges because it carried a
possible 30-year maximum sentence and would have branded him a sex
offender.

Prosecutors asked Eller to send LeBlanc to prison for five years, far
less than the maximum. The judge reduced him to the lowest rank,
airman, and ordered that he receive a dishonorable discharge.

By his own measure, LeBlanc's life had spiraled out of control.

Carefully selected to hold the job of training recruits, he later
abused them, helped lure two women into a dimly lit supply room where
they had sex with another instructor, cheated on his wife and threatened
to jump from a Loop 410 overpass just after Thanksgiving.

02/14/2013

An Air Force judge today found a training instructor guilty of all
but one charge stemming from a 2011 sexual encounter with a young woman
in a base supply room.

Staff Sgt. Craig LeBlanc could spend 22 years and one month in
prison, but was found not guilty of the most serious charge — sexually
assaulting the woman.

The judge, Col. Donald Eller
Jr., took two hours, 22 minutes to hand down the verdict, and recessed
court at lunchtime before moving to the sentencing phase.

In finding LeBlanc not guilty of sexual assault, Eller spared the
veteran NCO from a 30-year maximum prison sentence and being tagged as a
sexual offender. Before the verdict, LeBlanc risked spending up to 52
years in prison.

Prosecutors characterized LeBlanc as a fallen trainer who used his
rank and position as an elite military training instructor to coerce the
woman into having a tawdry sexual liaison.

Defense attorney Joseph Jordan
pointed to the woman's history of shading the truth, once on a
recruiting application and later to Air Force investigators looking into
the case, to show she couldn't be trusted.

“There's no other way to put it,” he said.

“She's a liar.”

One of 32 basic training instructors charged with misconduct in an ongoing scandal at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, LeBlanc was accused of nine charges and 12 specifications of misconduct.

The sexual assault charge was the most serious allegation. He's
pleaded not guilty to that charge and two others, but faced 15 years on
six other charges and nine specifications he pleaded guilty to Tuesday.

A recruit who the Air Force says was sexually assaulted by Staff Sgt. Craig LeBlanc at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland testified that she gave in because she feared his power to end her career.

Witnesses sketched a different picture Wednesday, saying she was
gregarious and attracted to LeBlanc, and bubbly after their liaison.

Chosen as a leader of her basic training flight because she wasn't
afraid to speak up, the woman identified as Airman 1 did just that when
she saw LeBlanc at a Lackland mall. It was part of a pattern of
flirtation between the two that others noticed.

“'Do you want some of this?'” Airman 1st Class Serah McManus
recalled the woman yelling at LeBlanc in the loud mall. “I said,
'You're in a training environment and you need to stop this,' and she
said, 'He started it.'”

Testimony from Airman 1 is critical to the case against LeBlanc, who
faces up to 52 years in prison on nine charges and 12 specifications of
misconduct.

Prosecutors say he used his power as a basic training instructor to
force her into having sex in a dimly lit supply room Oct. 10, 2011.

A fellow trainer, then-Staff Sgt. Kwinton Estacio,
got a year in prison and a bad-conduct discharge for seducing another
woman in the room. He was convicted of asking her to lie but acquitted
of sexual assault.

In citing her decision to offer only meek resistance to his advances
that night, Airman 1 said her primary concern was being “recycled” or
held back in basic training, which she characterized as a potentially
career-ending action.

She often couldn't recall key events that included the mall incident,
flirtatious comments about LeBlanc as he did one-armed pull-ups or if
she had received a briefing on lawful orders.

Airman 1st Class Khristy Neou, a member of her flight, said she saw
Airman 1 shave her legs at around 1 a.m., less than an hour before the
tryst.

02/13/2013

An Air Force instructor pleaded guilty today to having sex with a
recruit in basic training as well as having an affair with another woman
while she was in technical school.

Staff Sgt. Craig LeBlanc
could get 15 years and one month in prison, as well as a dishonorable
discharge. He is fighting three other allegations that could more than
double his time behind bars.

The trial judge, Col. Donald Eller, told LeBlanc he would defer sentencing until evidence was heard on the other charges.

The court broke for lunch, with testimony to resume this afternoon.

LeBlanc was accused of nine charges and 12 specifications of
misconduct, including sexually assaulting a woman after she graduated
from basic training by luring her and another recruit to a base supply
room.

He is one of 32 basic training instructors charged with misconduct in an ongoing scandal at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland.
The Air Force said today that the number of victims had risen from 59
to 62 recruits and technical training students, all but three of them
women.

LeBlanc is accused of having sex with a woman identified as Airman 1
the weekend that she graduated from basic training in October 2011 while
a second instructor, Staff Sgt. Kwinton Estacio, had sex with a second basic training graduate.

Estacio, who was cleared of sexual assault but found guilty of having
an unprofessional sexual relationship, violating a no-contact order and
obstructing justice, got one year in jail and a bad-conduct discharge.

LeBlanc said the instructors lured the women to a dimly lit supply room early one morning.

He said that he and LeBlanc schemed with the women to come up with a
plan that would explain why they were leaving their all-female dormitory
bay.

Typically, trainees do not leave their dorms at night unless they are given orders to do so.

“All four of us knew it was wrong and we were afraid,” LeBlanc said
in explaining his guilty plea. “Still, I wanted to have sex with Airman
(1).”